A Royal Blog for all matters belonging to the King, a king, &/or kings.

Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Modern Ancient Art Mystery

Here are photos of 2 modern works-of-art that caught my attention last month:

They bear the same ancient inscription, & I initially thought that a modern artist would choose one of the best-known Paleo-Hebrew texts to replicate, but this one puzzled me; I was disappointed in myself for not recognizing the artifact without doing a bit of research.

I thought it would be fun to give all 3 of my regular readers the opportunity to see if they could identify it easier/quicker than I could.

In the 1st photo showing the right half of the text, I cropped off the left half because it shows a map identifying the site it came from.

I rotated the 2nd photo showing front/back images of the object because the artist obviously isn't familiar with the script. The photographer did a decent job of getting most of the letters as they wrap around in the images; but I can't vouch for whether the object actually contains the entire inscription. I suspect that some of it is truncated.

2) It contains 2 instances of "MLK" (only 1 is visible in the photos, & it's not obvious).

For the savvy Biblical archeology sleuth, those should be sufficient since there ain't that many published texts. There are a couple of obvious keywords that will give it away if you have a corpus of ANE inscriptions.

Assuming that none of my 3 readers are that savvy, I will post additional hints in comments but only after 2 readers post guesses. And most importantly, in an effort to discourage arbitrary, rapid-fire, multiple guesses from any one person (named pithom), I will not approve a 2nd guess by anyone until at least one other person guesses, so make your first guess a really "good" one! I know you're able.